Conference Report: “The Transregional Production, Translation, and Appropriation of Knowledge: Actors, Institutions, and Discourses”

The Ibero-American Institute Berlin hosted a workshop on “The Transregional Production, Translation, and Appropriation of Knowledge: Actors, Institutions, and Discourses” October 10-11, 2014 as part of their research activities of the past four years on “cultural transfer and scientific exchange between Europe and Latin America.”

UNAM library (photo: Scott Campbell under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Although the relationship between the regions is asymmetrical, the exchange is in no way a unilateral. When analyzing this exchange we can take different perspectives, as Peter Birle (Ibero-American Institute, Berlin) pointed out in his introduction: The positivist approach centers on the regularities of relations between scientists and their research and the diffusion of Western scientific values. But we can also look at the scientific practices and micro-transactions of knowledge circulation with an emphasis on research facilities and networks or even the colonial legacy of the European style of knowledge production and management in Latin America and the effects of Eurocentricity on science and research. Another perspective is an analysis through Bourdieu’s field theory: the acceptance and circulation of foreign ideas widely depend on the characteristics of the local field.

As this already shows, questions about knowledge production and exchange are multifaceted and can be seen from many different perspectives and through different disciplines. Find out more about the conference in this report. To find out more about the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut visit their website.